INGLEWOOD, CALIFORNIA — It seems like the perfect site for a
shopping center: A burning slab of undeveloped blacktop spreads
over 60 acres, while traffic rushes by on all sides; houses stack
up the surrounding hills and into the smoggy horizon. The people
who live in those houses are tired of driving to nearby cities like
Gardena, Torrance and Los Angeles to dine and buy clothes and
widgets. Besides, Inglewood could use an economic shot in the arm.
Downtown is dead. The Lakers basketball team moved out of the arena
next door, years ago. And all the unemployed young people need
jobs.

Inglewood, a city of about 112,000 residents,
mostly black and Latino, butts up against Los Angeles International
Airport, just a few breezy miles from the Pacific Ocean. Despite
its reputation as an extension of inner-city L.A., Inglewood
functions like a small town, with its tightly knit community, proud
middle class, subtle provincialism — and insecurities about
jobs and municipal revenue, which is why the proposed shopping
center, sweetly named the HomeStretch at Hollywood Park, held so
much promise.

Inglewood resident Danny Tabor saw the
potential. The space might have been filled by businesses he likes
— maybe a Chili’s restaurant, an Outback Steakhouse, or
an Old Navy clothing store. As a former city councilman, he knew a
shopping center could bring in needed tax revenue. After all, he
was on the council when it approved a Costco, and now, he says,
he’s addicted to shopping there.

But this spring,
Tabor helped lead a local uprising against the shopping center
proposal, because there was one problem: The only surefire tenant,
and the primary backer, was Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The company
planned to build one of its giant, 200,000-square-foot Supercenters
— the combined discount-pharmacy-grocery stores that Wal-Mart
is planting in communities around the West.

From suburban
Denver, Colo., to Washington’s apple country, from the resort
blowout of Park City, Utah, to the faux-adobe subdivisions of New
Mexico, Wal-Mart’s aggressive expansion has become a symbol
of how big-box retailers and franchise chains invade communities,
bringing a range of impacts and reactions. Some local people
welcome Wal-Mart, with its low prices and employment opportunities.
Others resist, worrying that the corporate giant will siphon away
profits and ruin local businesses, leaving a sprawling, homogenized
commercial landscape and a retail graveyard on Main Street. They
are wary of Wal-Mart’s low wages, and its reputation for
mistreating its workers and discriminating against women.

In self-defense, many Western communities have adopted
"anti-big-box ordinances" that require Wal-Mart to pay impact fees,
limit the size of its stores, and abide by other restrictions. But
the company has refused to back down.

Wal-Mart has
threatened lawsuits, sued, and, when that hasn’t worked, it
has taken to what may be its most dangerous practice: co-opting
local democracy itself. In community after community, it has
gathered enough petition signatures to put the issue to voters,
overwhelming its opposition with millions of dollars in advertising
and mailers, frosting its agenda in a populist coating. The
practice has triggered deep concerns about the power of
corporations to hijack local decision-making.

In
Inglewood, Wal-Mart took this approach to the next level,
attempting to exempt itself from all of the local planning rules.
As one opponent here puts it, "Wal-Mart was trying to establish a
sovereign state inside the city of Inglewood."

Yet here,
local opponents beat Wal-Mart at its own game. Today, as Danny
Tabor sits at a table at Bourbon Street Fish, he can look across
the street and see the 60-acre space where Wal-Mart wasn’t
allowed to build. To him, the empty space represents neither a lost
opportunity for low-priced meals or shopping, nor a missing
municipal gold mine. Instead, it symbolizes his community’s
stand against the biggest corporation in the world.

"Democracy worked for people in this sense," Tabor says, "against
big business."

Stories about Wal-Mart typically mention
that the first Wal-Mart was a five-and-dime in a small town in
Arkansas, opened by Sam Walton in the 1950s — precisely the
kind of mom-and-pop store now threatened by today’s Wal-Mart
empire. From its tiny beginning, Wal-Mart has grown into a retail
behemoth through its single-minded focus on slashing prices,
cutting costs, and moving huge volumes of merchandise.

Wal-Mart tries to project a friendly image, with greeters at every
store wearing smiley-face pins. Travelers in RVs are encouraged to
camp overnight in the parking lots. The corporation pours millions
of dollars into scholarships, the United Way and recycling
programs.

But today’s Wal-Mart is a species of
corporation never seen before. It is the world’s largest
company, with annual sales of more than $250 billion, "a sum
greater than the economies of all but 30 of the world’s
nations," reports The New York Times. In the
United States, Wal-Mart is the number-one seller of clothing, toys,
home furnishings, home textiles, housewares, tableware, DVDs,
vacuum cleaners, televisions and video game consoles, and it has
the nation’s largest private trucking fleet, reports the
Denver Post.

Soon after it launched
its Supercenters in 1988, Wal-Mart also became the nation’s
leading grocer. The nation’s approximately 1,448 Wal-Mart
discount stores have been joined by 1,506 Supercenters, and the
number increases by dozens nearly every week. To find space for its
outlets, which include Sam’s Club warehouse stores and small
Neighborhood Market grocery stores, the corporation buys more than
$1 billion worth of land per month, according to The
Economist.

In the West, Wal-Mart’s
expansion is nothing short of a stampede. In Utah, Wal-Mart took
out $130 million worth of commercial building permits in 2003,
according to a University of Utah study — 12 percent of the
state’s nonresidential total. Westwide, Wal-Mart opened 42
discount stores and Supercenters last year. In California alone, it
plans to open another 40 Supercenters — each larger than five
football fields — within six years. And as Wal-Mart has
grown, its image has changed. It has been accused of "predatory
pricing" — coming in initially with lower prices, killing off
the competition, and then raising prices. The relentless pressure
on its 21,000 suppliers to lower their costs has contributed to the
trend of U.S. manufacturers moving jobs to Latin America and Asia.
And it has become abundantly clear that Wal-Mart’s low prices
are built on the backs of its 1.2 million employees.

Wal-Mart’s low wages also force its competitors to lower
their pay in order to compete, says Harold Meyerson, an
L.A. Weekly editor and Washington
Post columnist, and as a result, a vital chunk of society
is withering. Now that many manufacturing jobs have moved overseas,
retail jobs support much of the working class — but thanks to
Wal-Mart, Meyerson writes, even retail wages are shrinking.

"We have lost something in Los Angeles, something huge: a
decently paid working class ... The loss is national as well,"
Meyerson writes. "Wal-Mart is both the leading metaphor and No. 1
economic force in this downward spiral."

But although
workers and local governments are becoming more concerned, attempts
to get the retailer to increase its wages might as well be demands
to raise the "always low prices." It’s a part of the equation
that’s not up for discussion, as sacrosanct as the
company’s growth itself.

One hundred and twenty
miles east of Inglewood is California’s first Wal-Mart
Supercenter. Opened this March in the desert resort town of La
Quinta, the store sits a few hundred yards down the road from the
old, non-super Wal-Mart, which went dark when the new one opened.
Already, the Supercenter is the kind of place where motorists camp
out waiting for vacant parking spots and you have to stand in line
for the bathroom.

La Quinta, like many fast-growing
Western resort communities, is a place with its lines drawn: The
box stores are separated from the boutiques, and the wealthy and
their golf courses are gated in, away from the working class, which
consists largely of Mexican immigrants.

But they all meet
at Wal-Mart, where elderly Anglos push carts among Latina clerks
and shelf stockers.

Cashier Cecilia Juarez says she likes
the work OK, but her co-worker, Maria Cuevas, says, "I don’t
like it, because they don’t pay much." Cuevas, a cashier who
started working at the Supercenter two months ago, says she earns
$7.25 an hour. Like many other Wal-Mart employees, she’s a
working mother, and her wages don’t go far. But, as Juarez
says, there’s not much else available.

The city of
La Quinta was happy to welcome the Supercenter, says Assistant City
Manager Mark Weiss. Other cities, however, have felt quite
differently.

In early 2001, Calexico, Calif., across the
Mexican border from Mexicali, became one of the first cities in the
state to establish an ordinance dealing with big-box stores. City
Attorney Michael Rood says local grocers and unions presented the
template for an ordinance prohibiting stores larger than 150,000
square feet that sold more than a small amount of groceries. The
city council went along with the idea, Rood says, because it wanted
to protect local grocers.

In response, Wal-Mart
circulated petitions, and garnered enough signatures to put the
ordinance up for a public vote in the fall of 2001. Wal-Mart
reportedly invested about $140,000 in the campaign, creating a
nice-sounding front group called "Calexico Families Against Higher
Prices" that reportedly conducted phone surveys, asking personal
questions about local grocers and insinuating that they were bad
people. In the end, the voters sided with the corporation by a
margin of 2-to-1. Wal-Mart plans to break ground in a couple of
months, Rood says.

To the north, the board of supervisors
in Contra Costa County, in the San Francisco Bay area, approved an
anti-Supercenter ordinance similar to Calexico’s in 2003.
Again, Wal-Mart circulated petitions and put the issue on the
ballot. It also created the so-called "Wal-Mart Customer Action
Network," and recruited members at three existing discount stores
in the county. In exchange for signing up, about 10,000 customers
got a personal membership card, free newsletters, bulletins and an
invitation to special events, according to the San
Francisco Chronicle. Members also got voter registration
forms, so they would be sure to be able to vote in the
company-backed referendum.

As Wal-Mart’s Contra
Costa campaign ratcheted up, the central issue became clear to
county supervisor John Gioia: Does local government have the
ability to regulate development? "For us, it’s about setting
the terms and conditions under which big boxes enter our
community," Gioia says.

The campaign became a storm of
spin, messaging and money — for both sides. Contra Costa
County spent $800,000 on the campaign against Wal-Mart’s
initiative. But Wal-Mart spent $2 million, a county record for a
ballot measure. In March, residents voted 55 to 45 percent to knock
down the big-box ordinance.

"So, they outspent us. I
think it was as simple as that," Gioia says. "A complex issue like
this is hard to argue in a limited campaign. Planning issues
shouldn’t be turned into marketing."

The use of
the ballot box to override local and state government decisions has
become common throughout the West. A decade ago, California coastal
communities rallied to fight sprawl, using the state’s
initiative process to overturn bad planning decisions. Since then,
says Larry Kosmont, a Southern California land-use and economics
consultant, California voters have decided some 1,000 land-use
related initiatives. At their best, initiatives offer citizens a
way to influence decisions from which they have been excluded by
bureaucrats and elected officials. But "ballot-box planning" can be
unhealthy, Kosmont says, because "it hands a decision to people who
aren’t necessarily paying attention to the details."
Government works best when it forces quarreling interests to reach
compromises, and that takes time, he adds. Ballot-box planning, in
contrast, isolates decisions, and the result is always an absolute
yes or no.

Ballot-box planning has also become a handy
tool for corporations. With millions to invest in public-relations
campaigns, and armies of loyal shoppers, Wal-Mart has grabbed hold
of the grassroots, and not just in California.

In Taos,
N.M., for example, the city council approved a new zoning code in
1999 that quashed Wal-Mart’s plan to expand an existing
discount store to a Supercenter. Wal-Mart responded with a campaign
using slogans first coined by labor organizer Cesar Chavez, such as
Si se puede or "yes, we can." The company gathered 7,000 signatures
on petitions supporting the store. While the council stood up to
the pressure, Wal-Mart hasn’t given up: It now wants to build
a Supercenter on the outskirts of town.

In Fort Collins,
Colo., developers used a manufactured grassroots campaign, fueled
with cash, to convince voters to pass a ballot initiative
overturning the city council’s 1996 decision to reject a
Supercenter. The opposition was preparing a lawsuit that challenged
the ballot initiative, when Wal-Mart supporters brought in their
own lawyers. They threatened a countersuit that would have held
organizers personally responsible for stopping the project.
Wal-Mart foes backed down. Fort Collins now has a Supercenter
— and a locally owned grocery store has closed.

The
tactic doesn’t always work: Voters in Glendale, Ariz.,
defeated a ballot measure introduced by Wal-Mart that would have
overturned a city council decision to rule out a Supercenter. But
almost always, Wal-Mart has won. "When it comes to ballot-box
planning, the question is: Is this really what it was intended
for?" asks Ethan Seltzer, director of Portland State
University’s School of Urban Studies and Planning, who points
out that other corporations have defeated smaller foes with the
same method.

With its strip of well-patronized box stores
along Century Avenue, breezy Inglewood seems like an unlikely stage
for the most spectacular political battle yet between Wal-Mart and
local community foes. Many of Inglewood’s working-class
residents would gladly save money on groceries and other
necessities, and the community’s high unemployment rate
suggests that the town should be eager for the jobs.

But
Inglewood is also a strong union town, with an estimated 10,000
households that include a union member. Many families moved here to
work in aerospace and education, as well as in the chain groceries.
As a result, the unions have a strong role in local politics.

So early last year, when Wal-Mart and its partner,
Rothbart Development, came forward with the HomeStretch Supercenter
proposal, the Inglewood City Council hastily drafted a generic
big-box ordinance that banned stores larger than 150,000 square
feet that sold more than a limited amount of groceries. Once again,
Wal-Mart began to gather signatures and threatened to sue. The
council backed down, rescinding the ordinance. As the opposing
sides marshaled their forces, a crucial seat on the council was up
for grabs in the spring election, and the rest of the council
members were evenly divided over whether to allow a Supercenter.

Barbara Maynard, spokeswoman for the United Food and
Commercial Workers Local 770, says that when the union interviews
city council candidates, a standard question is: Do you support a
Wal-Mart in Inglewood? "If the answer is yes," she says,
"they’re not going to get an endorsement."

The
union found a candidate: Ralph Franklin, a former grocery clerk, a
Local 770 vice president, and a Wal-Mart hater. "I am a victim of
Wal-Mart," says Franklin, who came to Inglewood from a town in
Kansas, where a Wal-Mart invasion wiped out several existing
businesses, he says. The union thrust Franklin onto the campaign
trail in an election that became entirely about Wal-Mart.

Meanwhile, the union was leading 70,000 Southern California grocery
workers on strike against the traditional grocery chains, demanding
guarantees that the chains wouldn’t slash their wages and
benefits to compete with Wal-Mart. The strike forced the
workers’ issues into the headlines.

Ralph Franklin
defeated his pro-Wal-Mart opponent, and Wal-Mart gave up working on
a proposal that the new Inglewood council might reject. Instead, it
concentrated on wooing the public. The company crafted "Measure
04-A," a 71-page plan for the HomeStretch shopping center, and
started gathering signatures to put it on the ballot.

The
plan would have allowed Wal-Mart to do its own environmental and
traffic reviews, instead of the city. Down the road, says Weinberg,
Wal-Mart or the developer could have changed the style of its
signs, the setbacks or other aspects of the development, and the
city couldn’t have done anything about it. To change the
terms of the plan, the city would have had to hold another election
and win the approval of two-thirds of the voters.

It was
a new frontier in ballot-box planning, according to Kosmont: "I
haven’t seen this kind of measure that would circumvent all
processes." Nonetheless, Wal-Mart found a supportive community
leader in David Stewart, the president of the Inglewood Airport
Area Chamber of Commerce, who helped lead a citizens’ group
to get the measure on the ballot. Like Franklin, Stewart carries
strong memories of Wal-Mart from his hometown, except that his are
sweet, not sour.

"I grew up in Wal-Mart country," says
Stewart, who moved to Inglewood from Mississippi, where he says the
corporation was involved in improving his community. "I don’t
view them as the big, bad bully." Stewart helped organize the
petition drives, which collected more than 10,000 signatures on
Inglewood sidewalks.

In an attempt to build an army of
support that included greater Los Angeles, the company hired Kerman
Maddox, a locally famous political consultant and TV personality,
to spread the word about a recently opened discount store in nearby
Baldwin Hills — a "good Wal-Mart story," as Kanelos puts it.
And, playing to the predominantly black communities in South L.A.
and Inglewood, Wal-Mart joined organizations like the Greater Los
Angeles African-American Chamber of Commerce.

Wal-Mart’s CEO, Lee Scott, even sat down for a lengthy
interview on the local public TV station. The show was underwritten
by Wal-Mart. The host, Tavis Smiley, read some e-mails from angry
opponents. "Tavis, when Wal-Mart touts its commitments to diversity
in their promo spots on your show, don’t you realize
you’re being played?" read one e-mail. "They’re using
you as their little black pawn."

To which CEO Scott
replied, "The people who wrote those e-mails, I would guess, do not
know Wal-Mart. Our company is really about stores and clubs.
It’s about people in those stores and clubs. And I think when
people get to know the people in those stores and clubs, they tend
to like ’em, and like them being in their community."

But Measure 04-A was clearly driven by a corporate, not a
community, agenda. Stewart, who deflected most questions about
citizen involvement in the campaign, couldn’t remember the
name of the pro-development citizens’ group. No wonder, since
it morphed over time, from the "Citizens Committee to Welcome
Wal-Mart to Inglewood" on the initiative itself to the "Committee
to Welcome The HomeStretch at Hollywood Park Shopping Center" on
some of the last-minute mailings. The address of the "citizens"
group was listed as a "suite" in a downtown office building, but
proved to be nothing more than a post office box.

Taken
aback by Wal-Mart’s unprecedented move to establish itself in
Inglewood, the Local 770 geared up for a monumental fight.
"Everybody saw this Inglewood battle as the watershed battle," says
the union’s Maynard. "If Wal-Mart can do this here, they can
do this anywhere."

At first, the opposition came mostly
from the labor union — after all, the United Food and
Commercial Workers had been fighting Wal-Mart proposals all over
California. In Inglewood, the Los Angeles County Federation of
Labor poured in its support and its money. Then, from its
headquarters in downtown L.A., the Los Angeles Alliance for a New
Economy, an advocate for "living wages," offered its assistance.
Union reps, workers and alliance organizers knocked on doors and
met with community leaders, and the momentum began to shift.

Danny Tabor, the former city councilman, had been a
Wal-Mart shopper until he saw Measure 04-A. The fact that Wal-Mart
was avoiding the process that Costco and all the other big-boxes
had gone through irked him, so he stopped shopping there, and
started explaining the issue to others. "Ours was an education
campaign," Tabor says.

Elionai Padilla, a grocery worker
who had taken part in the Southern California strike, followed up
his months on the picket line by going door-to-door in Inglewood,
warning residents that Measure 04-A could mean low wages and meager
benefits, not just for Wal-Mart workers, but for other retail
workers as well. Often, he says, he was met with indignation and
hostility from people who really wanted Wal-Mart in their town.

"I said, ‘Let me tell you something, I’m just
fighting for my rights and my future,’ " Padilla says.
"Especially Hispanic people, when you explain to them, some of them
keep quiet and some of them start crying."

Maynard also
saw the change. "Along the way, the community stepped in to help
us. It became very organic. I’ve never seen people outside of
our usual world fighting for this."

People began to see
that Wal-Mart was giving them only one side of the story. Many also
came to believe that the company was targeting their town because
it thought it could find cheap labor among its black and Latino
residents. Eventually, much of Inglewood’s powerful clergy
joined the fight.

The Rev. Altagracia Perez of Holy Faith
Episcopal Church, who already had an interest in economic justice
issues, urged her congregation – many of whom were eager to
see a Supercenter in Inglewood — to explore just what the 71
pages of Measure 04-A would do. She said people in Inglewood wanted
jobs so badly that they didn’t stop to consider how Wal-Mart
could drag everyone down.

Perez talked to other
ministers, most of whom were at first hesitant to get in the way of
economic development, about how Wal-Mart was attempting an end run
around the city’s planning process. Many churches, including
the Faithful Central Bible Church, along with organizations like
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, changed their public
stands on the issue.

"When they realized it wasn’t
about a store, it was about the process," Perez says, "that’s
what made it safe. It wasn’t a big business thing."

Wal-Mart also made mistakes in Inglewood. Measure 04-A was a jungle
of subsections, statute references and site plans. It was hard for
people to understand, and that generated suspicion.

Even
Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn, who backed Wal-Mart and endorsed
the measure in mailings and commercials, acknowledges that voters
"resented the 71 pages that took everything out of the hands of the
council."

On April 6, despite outspending its opponents
at least 5 to 1, Wal-Mart lost. Inglewood voters shot down Measure
04-A by a 3-to-2 margin. Corporate Manifest Destiny hit a wall.

Over the past few months, Inglewood’s victory seems
to have emboldened other city leaders in the West.

In
California alone, nearly a dozen towns and counties have adopted
anti-big-box ordinances. The L.A. City Council is preparing to
consider an ordinance that would restrict stores larger than
100,000 square feet that sell significant amounts of groceries in
struggling neighborhoods, where the city has invested in public
housing and businesses. Josh Kamensky, a legislative deputy in the
office of L.A. Councilman Eric Garcetti, predicts that big-box
stores, with their low wages and paltry benefits, would damage the
city’s investments in these neighborhoods.

Wal-Mart’s Kanelos is angry that the city has singled out
Wal-Mart. Consumers, Kanelos says, "do not want government reducing
their shopping choices. America was built on open competition and
that’s what consumers want."

Many Westerners are
beginning to realize that the actual cost of shopping at Wal-Mart
is much higher than the numbers on the price tags, however. In
Idaho Falls, where Wal-Mart plans to build the town’s second
Supercenter, Post-Register publisher Jerry Brady
suggested in a recent editorial that his city needed a new entrance
sign reading, "Welcome to Wal-Mart Falls, Idaho, where we’re
willing to work cheap."

While there has been little local
opposition to Wal-Mart, Brady says that when he heard about
Inglewood, "I was encouraged and surprised. I think it’s good
somebody had the courage to (stand up to the company)."

In southern Oregon, the neighboring communities of Central Point
and Medford have recently defeated proposed Supercenters.
"It’s clear from seeing the Inglewood case that they’re
running into problems everywhere," says Becca Croft, whose group,
Central Point First Inc., was created to fight Wal-Mart.

Like other anti-Wal-Mart organizations, Croft’s group has
become a broader political force. In Taos, N.M., where Wal-Mart is
pushing its new proposal, Taoseños Against Wal-Mart Super
Store is encouraging residents to keep a close eye on their
leaders. Local democracy, says group member Fritz Hahn, "requires
citizens to go to meetings, and meet with their councilors …
People show up for the fire, but what we need is kindling."

But even with invigorated opposition, the corporate giant
remains the undeniable victor: Millions of people still shop at
Wal-Marts every day, and for every Supercenter proposal that is
defeated, dozens more are approved.

Even in Inglewood,
the promise of low prices is too good to shelve completely. The
victory over Wal-Mart may not be permanent. Only 11,624 people
voted in the referendum, a small fraction of Inglewood’s
population.

Mayor Dorn desperately wants Wal-Mart to try
again. "The city needs these 60 acres to be developed," he says.
"The city needs these jobs. The city needs $3 to $5 million in
sales tax."

So the Inglewood city government plans to ask
Wal-Mart to put together another proposal — this time, for
just a regular-size discount store.